If you saw my previous post, "With Apologies to Mr. Richter," you know that every technology business experiences the valley of death.  But, no matter what type of business you're trying to start, you need to do a proof of concept before you go all out and launch the business and to do that you need a prototype, which is simply a working model of the business--the product or service being offered.  Why? Because you can't get good feedback from customers if you don't have something they can see, touch, and interact with.  A prototype is easy to understand when you're talking about a product business, but what if you're doing a service business or an Internet business?  Here's where your creativity can shine. Consider this. A service business is simply a process, a set of activities and tasks that your company performs.  One of the first things you can do is lay out that process in a graphic showing the flow of activities and tasks.  Then you can test your service process on a willing customer for free.  With the feedback from that customer (and a testimonial we hope), you can slowly roll out to new customers, always modifying and improving the process with the experience you gather.

For an Internet business, a primitive prototype might be in the form of a storyboard or wireframe (a basic visual design of the user interface) depicting the various pages on the site and how they're connected. Once you have all the pieces in place,  you can move to the next prototype, which might be a simple functional version of your Web site to demonstrate some of the benefits.

Product prototypes can be very expensive to develop so here again you have to use some ingenuity to keep the costs down.  For a machine that we developed, we got the vendors of all the components to send us a free sample of their part.  Why would they do this?  First, because we convinced them that our product represented new market space for them that was worth their time (value proposition).  Then, we learned that it was usually cheaper for them to send us a free sample than to go through their entire sales process involving many people.  So our initial prototype of a fairly complex machine was practically free.

Getting to a working prototype fast means you learn very early the mistakes you're bound to make.  Correcting them before you finalize the design will save you a ton of money. In the next post I'll deal with the second half of the valley of death.